


A Little Comfort

by TaleWorthTelling



Category: Daredevil (TV), Luke Cage (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-23 08:50:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11986392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaleWorthTelling/pseuds/TaleWorthTelling
Summary: Misty Knight and Brett Mahoney catch up in a bar.





	A Little Comfort

**Author's Note:**

> I just thought these two could have met before and should meet, and Brett is underutilized and kind and instinctively comforts people, and Misty is going through a lot.
> 
> Spoilers for The Defenders.

Misty had had it just about up to here with this vigilante nonsense. Sure, she’d been bull-headed all on her own, did more steamrolling and demanding than listening more than once, but the fact remained that good people were hurt now, and there was nothing she and her badge could do about it. She was tired of constantly trailing two steps behind. Tired of finally busting into where she needed to be only to have her _arm_ sliced off.

Well. That one was new. But even after just once, she was already tired of that.

She felt _powerless_. In both senses of the word, really. It was becoming clear to her that being able to identify and accept the weird was no longer as impressive a skill set. She was powerless among people who could do a lot of freaky shit, and her aim would only get half the job done. And now she was down an arm.

Misty had a lot of soul-searching to do, and she’d grit her teeth and do it, but at the moment, she just wanted to sit in a bar and drink. So that’s what she did.

She was deliberating between the sweet lie of a vodka cranberry and the harsh, smoky burn of a neat whiskey when the stool three to her right rattled. She hated herself for a brief, frustrating second at the way she tensed, flinched, just a little. That was her bad side now, and she angled her body to compensate for it. Doing so gave her both a neck ache and a better look at the person who’d sat near her.

It took her a moment to place him, which she chalked up more to their brief meetings than the two drinks she’d already nursed. She’d heard he’d made detective last year, but, paradoxically, she’d seen him around less after his promotion than she had when he'd been a desk sergeant chained to Hell's Kitchen and she'd been firmly attached to Harlem.

His shoulders were hunched, he ordered his beer quietly, and he hung his head. He wasn’t looking fir attention, for a human connection, just a moment of peace, clearly. She understood that.

The thing was, sometimes a good distraction could amount to the same thing.

“Detective Brett Mahoney,” she said with as much warmth in her voice as she could manage at this particular point in her life. It still sounded slithery and wrong to her. She was a little out of practice.

He glanced up slowly. “Detective Knight,” he said politely, almost as softly as he’d been to the bartender

They hadn’t met too many times before, really just a few city functions and passing each other at crime scenes. She couldn’t say for sure that he seemed a little down, especially seeing as he hadn’t been especially effusive the handful of times they’d spoken, but she thought she sensed a bit of a bruised soul in the way his thumb idly swirled the condensation on his bottle, the way he looked at her through his lashes instead of head-on. Maybe not the same tiredness, but a tiredness all the same.

She really didn’t want to be alone tonight. She just didn’t feel like talking to herself.

She tucked what was left of her arm in closer to herself. She knew it was a self-conscious gesture, a huge tell, but she just didn’t have it in her to be above that right now.

She’d work on it later. She’d get better at this.

She hated small talk, but there was no room for anything else at the moment, so she gave it a shot. “Word’s got around about the work you’re doing over at the Fifteenth.”

He smiled weakly. “Not too shabby yourself.”

There wasn’t anything she could say to that that wouldn’t come out inappropriately dark, so she changed the subject instead. “I haven’t been to this place before.” She glanced around at all the dark wood, the dim lights, and it occurred to her that maybe she’d known what she was looking for from the moment she’d walked in.

He hesitated before he answered, like he was weighing his options, and then he turned just a few inches to face her more. “I’m not here often. It’s just … been a real couple of weeks, you know?”

His eyes suddenly went wide and he grimaced, cutting a quick look at her arm for the first time.

She took it in stride, bolstering herself with a strength that was both familiar and an illusion, and decided she’d give him that one, provided he didn’t dig himself deeper.

He didn’t.

“Sorry,” he said, dropping his shoulders a little. “Forgot.”

She chuckled, an ugly little thing that she didn’t really feel. “Sometimes I forget, too.”

Like a breached levee, her mouth crumpled, and the tide was unleashed. She leaned her forehead onto the cool bar surface, for once not caring about what might have touched it last, and wrapped her hand around the back of her neck. The orange band around her hair had worked itself a little lower over the course of the day, letting loose some coarse strands to tickle her palm, and she hadn’t had the energy to try to fix it. It was the best she could do until she got the hang of doing everything one-handed, and after all that time in the hospital, she just hadn’t really wanted to be touched, let alone sit still for hours to have it braided.

She wondered if she looked as exhausted as she felt.

She was too busy concentrating on stuffing it all back down to hear him approach her, but the bodily awareness that pinged when he sat beside her startled her out of her downward spiral. She turned her head, pressing her cheek flat instead so she could watch him. He didn’t try to reach for her, but the sudden openness of his body language, the softness in his expression, was so clear. It ought to have rankled her. She didn’t want to need a near-stranger’s compassion. She reminded herself that technically they were colleagues, and this was probably a terrible decision.

When he signaled for the bartender with one hand and loosened his tie with the other, she decided it really didn’t matter.

“You were on my list anyway,” he said, oddly more relaxed than when he’d tried to be casual. Maybe he was always on the job just a little, too. “I was going to have to talk to you eventually about a missing person case.”

She pulled herself up shoulders first until she was actually sitting, instead of slumped over the bar like a drunk. She turned over her most recent cases in her mind, trying to figure out which one might share mutual interests with his precinct. It didn’t take her long to decide which one it had to be, and she gave herself a couple of points for suppressing the shudder that wanted to rock her on her stool. “That lawyer? Murdock?”

He nodded. “That’s the one.”

There was a heaviness in the way he said it that told her it was somewhat personal, and despite herself, and despite her commitment to the job, she wasn’t sure she could accommodate that right now. She hoped he’d understand. But she wasn’t a total asshole, despite the pool of self-pity she was currently trying to surface from, giving it one final send-off in this bar before she started over in the morning.

“You know him?” she tried, giving him options.

“Friend of a friend. He, uh … he was a good guy.”

“Sounds like you’re not expecting to find him.”

He winced. “I don’t know what I’m expecting.”

They talked shop for a while, the first she’d been able to in what felt like ages, and, slowly, the knot that had cinched her chest since that night the building and her confidence had imploded … it eased. Just a bit. Just enough to breathe again. She felt closer to normal than she had in weeks.

“Do you want to get a cab?” she finally asked, realizing that a direct approach was best. She’d gotten the impression that Brett didn’t do this often, maybe hadn’t done this at all before.

He looked surprised. Maybe she hadn’t conveyed availability and flirting as well as she’d tried. She didn’t normally have to try, honestly; maybe it was harder when you had to think about it. Normally it was something that she just did.

She didn’t dwell on it. He bit his lip, looked like he was thinking.

“My place is close enough to walk, if you don’t mind.”

It seemed like he was trying to give her an out, in case she changed her mind on the way, but this was not her first rodeo. She humored him despite knowing that there was no way she’d change her mind, or else she’d never stop changing it, and she had no intention of letting that happen.

Besides, whether she admitted it or not, she knew she needed the comfort of human contact on her terms, and he seemed like he needed to offer that comfort. Some people were just like that: needed to give to feel better.

There was a familiar chill in the air when they gathered themselves together and left the bar, a familiar urban smell, familiar sounds. It was just like it had been when she’d walked in, barely even any darker thanks to the light pollution of the city. Sometimes it felt like time wasn’t even passing on this island until the first winter frost crawled up her window. But she felt different.

They walked in silence, not speaking until the lock clicked and he withdrew his key from his front door. “Sorry ‘bout the mess. The weirder the world gets, the less I vacuum.”

It wasn’t too bad, just a little clutter and some cobwebs you’d need a broom to reach, a pile of laundry on the table he’d folded but hadn’t gotten the chance to put away. Better than her place lately.

Normally, during these encounters, she’d already be wrapped around him, seeking, taking. Normally her heels would click across his kitchen floor in easy strides and one, two, three, it'd be happening.

She hadn’t work heels in a while. She was still relearning her balance.

Still, she tried to feel sexy, desirable, confident, as she waited for him to come to her.

He did, and with his hand lightly on her hip and his gaze steady on hers, he kissed her.

She melted into the familiarity, smiling against him as she hooked her fingers through one of his belt loops.

**Author's Note:**

> I think Brett put two and two together, honestly.


End file.
